Sunday, November 6, 2011

Yellow ware, Ewer, and other words from Mars

For someone who loves kitchen junk as much as I do, I've really put off learning about pottery & ceramics. I just don't naturally gravitate towards them. I'm a glass junky. But here and there, I've picked up pottery pieces that has caused me to spend half a day on the computer, researching the company and looking at pictures.

First it was Hall china, then Fiesta. But I've managed to avoid picking up even the slightest bit of knowledge about some of the other big names - like McCoy and Hull.

Well, just today I found out that quite a few of my grandmother's kitchen items were Hull. The green wheat yellow ware sugar canister (with the mark that I kept thinking looked like a Heisey mark) is, in fact, Hull - and probably originally belonged to my great-grandmother, by the dates. Online auctions date them mostly as 1920's, Replacements.com has the dates at 1915-35. Yellow ware is a term that is totally new to me, so add another thing I will probably spend an inordinate amount of time researching.Also, the set of everyday china I ate from as a kid was Hull brown drip. It is just as sad & drab of a pattern as the name SOUNDS like it would be. No offense intended to Hull admirers, but boy-howdy, I just really don't care for this pattern - nostalgia or no.

One of the things that is so strange to me about Hull, having just started researching it, is just how very different the patterns can be. For example, I was looking at some pictures from Replacements.com of the pattern "Woodland". Not a huge fan of the coloration, but the shapes are really neat. Organic but fantastical at the same time. Going straight from looking at Brown Drip to that just cracked me up and how truly different they are.

That's where I saw the word "ewer" - which means a decorative vase, usually with a pronounced pour spout. Sometimes this stuff is like trying to learn a whole 'nother language. I mean, who is just born knowing that a bowl is sometimes called a "nappy"? What exactly is a "salver"? Really! But because of the internet (and partially because I'm crazy) I know that I could set my ewer in a nappy and carry them on a salver.